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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Blog

0. A Note at the Beginning:

I’ve been inspired by José Saramago’s extraordinary
blogs, which he posted when he was 85 and 86 years old. They were published
this year in English as The Notebook. I read them with amazement and
delight.

I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the
word blog — I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like
that, but it sounds like a sodden tree-trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction
in the nasal passage (oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible
blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,”
that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply
to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too
introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can
write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

So, though I have contributed a few blog-like objects to
Book View Café, I never enjoyed them. After all, despite the new name, they
were just opinion pieces or essays, and writing essays has always been tough
work for me and only occasionally rewarding.

But seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation.

Oh! I get it! I see! Can I try too?

My trials/attempts/efforts (that’s what “essays” means)
so far have very much less political and moral weight than Saramago’s and
are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form,
maybe not. Maybe I’ll soon find it isn’t for me after all, and
stop. That’s to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of
freedom.

1. In Your Spare Time

I got a questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion
of the Harvard graduating class of 1951. Of course my college was Radcliffe,
which at that time was affiliated with but wasn’t considered to be Harvard, due to a difference in
gender; but Harvard often overlooks such details from the lofty eminence where
it can consider all sorts of things beneath its notice. Anyhow, the
questionnaire is anonymous, therefore presumably gender-free; and it is
interesting.

The people who are expected to fill it out are, or would be,
almost all in their eighties; and sixty years is time enough for all kinds of
things to have happened to a bright-eyed young graduate. So there’s a polite
invitation to widows or widowers to answer for the deceased. And Question 1c,
“If divorced,” gives an interesting set of little boxes to check: Once, Twice,
Three times, Four or more times, Currently remarried, Currently living with a
partner, None of the above. This last option is a poser. I’m trying to think how
you could be divorced and still none of the above. In any case, it seems
unlikely that any of those boxes would have been on a reunion questionnaire in
1951. You’ve come a long way, baby! as the cigarette ad with the bimbo on it
used to say.

Question 12: “In general, given your expectations, how have
your grandchildren done in life?” The youngest of my grandchildren just turned
four. How has he done in life? Well, very well, on the whole. I wonder what
kind of expectations you should have for a four-year-old. That he’ll go on
being a nice little boy, and learn pretty soon to read and write, is all that
comes to my mind. I suppose I’m supposed to expect him to go to Harvard, or at
least to Columbia like his father and grandfather. But being nice and learning
to read and write seems quite enough for now.

Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes,
and fears. Mostly the fears predominate, these days. When my kids were young I
could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but
now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering
industrialism with its future-horizon of a few months, any hope I have that
coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and
has to reach far, far forward into the dark.

Question 13: “What will improve the quality of life for the
future generations of your family?” — with boxes to rank importance from 1 to
10. The first choice is “Improved educational opportunities,” — fair enough,
Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is
“Economic stability and growth for the US.” That stymied me totally. What a
marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth
and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have
both,” and didn’t check a box.

The rest of the choices are: Reduction of the US debt,
Reduced dependence on foreign energy, Improved health care quality and cost,
Elimination of terrorism, Implementation of an effective immigration policy,
Improved bipartisanship in US politics, Export democracy.

Since we’re supposed to be considering the life of future
generations, it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and
filtered through such current rightwing obsessions as “terrorism,” “effective”
immigration policy, and the “exportation” of “democracy” (which I assume is a
euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don’t like and trying to
destroy their society, culture, and religion.) Nine choices, but nothing about
climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about
population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the
control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice
or poverty...

Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored
again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none,
my desires are flagrant.”

But it was Question 18 that really got me down. “In your
spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply) And the list begins:
“Golf...”

Seventh in the list of 27 occupations, after “Racquet
sports” but before “Shopping,” “TV,” and “Bridge,” comes “Creative activities
(paint, write, photograph, etc.)”

Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a
while.

The key words are “spare time.” What do they mean?

To a working person, supermarket checker, lawyer, highway
crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress, spare time
is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive,
cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To
people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such.

But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have
but “spare” time?

I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to
retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always been
proud to consider myself a working woman. But to the Questioners of Harvard my
lifework has been a “Creative Activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up
spare time. Perhaps if they knew I’d made a living out of it they’d move it to
a more respectable category; but I rather doubt it.

The question remains: When all the time you have is spare,
is free, what do you make of it?

And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time
you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class
kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their
time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with
it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No
stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read,
I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley, I moseyed around having thoughts and
feelings, oh, lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings. . . . I hope some kids still
have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming,
rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer
practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle
into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in
body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she
has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it and is
alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my
case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It
always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.

An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily
maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time,
or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time
is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business
and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry,
with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with
cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Vergil,
with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for
groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with
sitting vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the
Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon
rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying
the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself
and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t
spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one tomorrow. I
have no time to spare.

2. Miners and I-Pods

In Roger Cohen’s New York Times column on October 18, I read
that a set of I-pods had been donated to entertain the thirty-three Chilean
miners in their underground ordeal, but the devices were not given to the men,
whose awareness of their situation and consciousness of one another might be
crucial to their survival as a group. As Cohen put it, “The donated iPods were
not sent down to the miners for fear they would prove isolating and break the
life-saving camaraderie of ‘Los 33.’ Salvation can still depend on seeing those
around you.”

This was interesting, this practical application of the idea
that people absorbed in their electronic devices may be profoundly insulated
from reality. Most of us admit that people talking on cell phones are thus
insulated or isolated: They’re unaware, conscious only to a limited degree of
people around them, cars on the street, etc. But denial is strong; the gross
discourtesy of so many cell-phone users is condoned, there’s endless resistance
to banning the use of cell phones by drivers. Have the Chileans a different
view of all this? Are they a bit less complacent about what happens to us when
we’re plugged in? I wanted to learn more — who sent the I-pods, but more
importantly who decided that the miners were better off without them.

When I googled Chilean miners I-pods, I learned at
once that it was Steve Jobs who sent the I-pods. But from the information I
could find on the Net, it appears the gift arrived only after the men had been
brought up into the light. All the stories are dated October 14, and each
simply repeats the others. None of them is factually specific or adds any
details, except for a couple that mention that PSPs, toys on which you play
electronic games, were sent down to the men while they were still in the
mine.

So I am left frustrated, as one so often is by the strange
fragmentedness of news these days, and by a sense that the whole picture is out
there somewhere but you don’t know where to go to get it. I’m reluctant to believe
that a Times op-ed writer swallowed a hokey story whole, but I’d sure like to
know where he got it; and whether the I-pods did in fact arrive while the
miners were still underground but were withheld from them until they got out; and
if so, who made the decision, and how they explained it.

3. The Absent Silence

A year or two ago I was asked to review a novel by José Saramago, and in looking up facts about him on Google I
found over and over the same quotation from him —

God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that
gives meaning to that silence.

It’s from his Lanzarote journals,
which aren’t available in English. He quoted it himself last year in one of his
own blogs (translated as The Notebook).
I wanted it again just a couple of weeks ago for my introduction to the
electronic edition of his novels being prepared (hurrah!) by Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt. I wasn’t sure I remembered it exactly, and The Notebook was up in the attic with Charles, and so I went
confidently to google it. I thought I knew how it
started, so I tried “God is silence.” That got me some hits, but nothing from Saramago. I tried “God is the silence.” That got me the
same page as before. So I tried “Saramago quotations”
and variants on that. They all took me to a page with lots and lots of
quotations from Saramago — singly, in sets of 20, in
sets of 43 — but in hurriedly looking through them, I didn’t find the one I was
looking for, certainly the most famous single thing Saramago
ever wrote. At this point, paranoia raised its stupid little yellow-green head.

Saramago was an atheist, not of
the professional Dawkinsian type, but a man to whom
the whole God business made no sense, though it interested him. His antipathy
was reserved for the profiteers and power-mongers of religion, such as the
mufti who authorised marriage for girls of ten, the
imam who approved stoning women accused of adultery, the pope who has found it
so hard to condemn pederasty among his priests. His speaking out on such
matters made him enemies, of course. I mean, the man was a godless commie
foreigner. Really. He was.

So I sat there entertaining paranoid thoughts: Had some
zealous crusader gone through Google’s material on Saramago
and removed the offensive quotation? I knew this kind of thing happens on
Wikipedia, but in a wiki people look out for censoring and tampering and can
make it unhappen just as promptly. How Google works,
I didn’t know, but I knew it’s not a wiki. I didn’t suspect Google of
initiating censorship, but wondered if it was vulnerable to sneak-in
censorship. A worrisome thought to think about an information service so many
of us rely on. So, instead of going on looking for the quotation as I should
have done, I wrote a little blog about the mysterious absence of the quotation.

My First Reader read it and said, “But you didn’t try ‘God
is the silence of the universe.’”

Oh.

So I asked Google for “God is the silence of the universe“ (and
put it in quotes) and there it was, about a ten thousand times, pages and pages
of God is the silence of the universe.

So much for paranoia. No crusaders. Just my own (lazy)
incompetence at googling.

But the mistake sometimes leads the mind to the place it
really wanted to go...

By embarrassing myself (and thanks to my First Reader) I
began to consider something I’d only very vaguely known and hadn’t given much
thought to: the fact that how Google gets and handles its information is an
industrial secret.

Understandably. If how Thomas’s get the nooks and crannies
into their English muffins is an industrial secret, how Google comes to know
everything that is known certainly deserves to be one too.

And yet it is disturbing. (Paranoia?)

I know that people far better equipped to discuss this whole
matter have discussed it at length. Undoubtedly I could look up such
discussions through Google. At this point I’m not ready to read them. I need to
think about it in my own terms first.

Putting it into language familiar to me: it’s as if a great
library, say the Library of Congress, refused to tell where they got their
books and how they got their books and who chose the books and whether all the
books they had were in the catalogue and available or some were held back, kept
secret.

Of course there’s no point in libraries doing that. A public
library has no industrial secrets, not being in business for the money. A
public library is a public trust. And the “trust” in that old-fashioned phrase
is, has to be, mutual, reciprocal. The public trusts the library not to censor,
change, or withhold valuable books or information, as the library trusts the
public won’t force them to censor, change, withhold, or destroy books or
information. And if the library, at the request of the public, does withhold
some material from some people (as in finding ways to keep exploitive
pornography from children using the library) this is done (if it’s rightly
done) openly, with knowledge and consent on both sides.

But a great corporation, even one sworn to do no evil, makes
no such bargain with the public. There is no reciprocity. Trust is not mutual. It’s
understood that the public interest, if considered at all, comes second to the
interests of the corporation — profit, growth, and power. So the corporation
can and will keep its secrets, even though what it is dealing in is
information, even when its business is making knowledge accessible, open, free
— the very opposite of keeping secrets.

What a strange,
paradoxical situation! It is quite beyond me. I can’t help but wonder if it
might also be beyond even the intelligent and competent people who run Google. Do
they really know what they are doing? And if they don’t, do they know they
don’t — or is that too a secret, kept even from themselves?

4. Someone Named Delores

A sentence in a story has been troubling me. The story, by
Zadie Smith, was in The New Yorker recently (October 11, 2010). It’s in
the first person, but I don’t know whether it’s fiction or memoir. Many people don’t
even make the distinction, now that memoir takes the liberties of fiction
without taking the imaginative risks, and fiction claims the authority of
history without assuming the factual responsibilities. To my mind the I of a
memoir or “personal essay” is a very different matter from the I of a story or
novel, but I don’t know if Zadie Smith sees it that way. And so I don’t know
whether she’s speaking as a character in fiction or as herself when towards the
end of her tale of a seemingly unrepaid loan to a friend she says, “The first
check came quickly but sat in a pile of unopened mail because these days I hire
someone to do that.”

The implacable editor in my hindbrain promptly inquired You
hire someone not to open the mail? I silenced the meddling reptile, but the
sentence continued to bother me.

“These days I hire someone to do that.” What’s wrong with
that? Well, I guess it’s the “someone.” Someone is no one. The nameless nobody
hired to answer the mail of a somebody with a name.

So, at this point I’m beginning to hope that the story is
fiction and thus that the narrator is not Zadie Smith, because this doesn’t
sound like the voice of a writer highly sensitive to class and color
prejudices. It reminded me, in fact, of the dean’s wife, when I was a lowly
assistant professor’s wife, who couldn’t leave “my housekeeper” out of her
conversation for five minutes, she was in such a state of admiration of herself
for having the grand house that required keeping and the housekeeper to keep
it. But that was silly, naive, like Mr Collins continually mentioning “my
patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” The statement “these days I hire someone to
do that” has a harsher ring to it.

And so what? Why shouldn’t a highly successful writer hire
help and say so? And what skin is it off my nose?

Envy, of course, in the first place. I am envious of people
who hire a servant with perfect assurance of righteousness. I envy
self-confidence even as I dislike it. Envy co-exists only too easily with
righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each
other.

And then, annoyance. There’s an “of course” implied in “I
hire someone to do that,” and there’s no of course about it. But people think
there is, and this kind of talk encourages them to think so — which annoys me.

It’s a widespread illusion: a writer (a successful writer, a
real writer) doesn’t do her own mail. She has a secretary to do it, as well as
helpers, amanuenses, researchers, handlers — lord knows what — maybe an
Editor’s Hole in the east wing, like the Priest’s Hole in old British houses.

I imagine writers commonly had secretaries, a century ago.
Henry James did, sure enough. But Henry James was not exactly your average
writer, right?

Virginia Woolf didn’t.

Among writers I know personally, only one has a secretary to
do mail. To me it seems a perquisite of the extremely successful, and of a
magnitude of success that daunts me. Privacy to be with my family and do my
work was of the first importance to me. So, when I began to need help answering
my letters, I found it extremely difficult to convince myself that I needed it
badly enough to justify my hiring “someone,” bringing a stranger into my study,
setting myself up as a boss.

I always had trouble calling Delores my secretary, it
sounded so pompous (echoes of “my housekeeper...”) If I had to speak of her to
strangers I said her name, or “my friend who does mail for me.” But I knew that
this latter phrase was one of the mildly devious devices by which we handle
guilt, the ways we try to re-introduce humanity into the relationship of hirer
and hired, which inevitably, to whatever slight a degree, involves inequality,
the raising up of one and degradation of the other. Democracy by strenuously
denying the fact of inequality does enable us, to a surprising extent, to act
as if it didn’t exist; but it does exist, and we know it. So our job is to keep
the inequity of power as small as possible, and refuse to let our common
humanity be reduced, however slightly, even by a careless word, by an assertion
of unequal worth.

My envy of writers who hire a person to handle their mail
and annoyance at people who assume that I have such help are really quite mild,
but they are painful now, because I did have “someone,” but I have lost her.

Delores Rooney, later Delores Pander, was my helper and dear
friend.

Thirty years ago or so, I finally got up my courage and
asked around for recommendations of a professionally competent and discreet person
to give me a hand with my letters, which were getting beyond me. Our mutual
friend Martha West, who had worked with Delores as a secretary in an office,
recommended her. She was then working as manager-agent for a dance company. We
rather nervously gave it a try.

I had never dictated anything to anybody (outside Beginning
French courses where you very slowly and clearly read a dictée in French
to the students who very slowly and inaccurately write it down.) Delores had
taught herself shorthand and was a whiz at it — a skill now, I suppose, almost
entirely lost? — and she’d taken lots of dictation from lots of dictators. She
coached me in composing a letter orally, and encouraged me with praise; she was
an excellent teacher. And also she’d worked and lived with artists, painters,
dancers, and was used to artistic temperamental peculiarities, having a few of
her own.

We got to doing letters quickly and easily, and I soon began
to draw on her as a collaborator in composing the letters — what to say and how
to say it. Does that sound all right? What if you said this instead of that?
What on earth am I going to write to the man who sent me the 600-page
manuscript about fairies on Venus? This one’s a whiner, you don’t have to
answer him... — Delores was always better than me at kind answers to kooks, but
she was tough-minded, too, and encouraged me not to answer a letter that was
troublingly weird or made unreasonable demands. She got to be so good at
replying to the eternally repeated questions that I could hand her a letter and
just say “Idea for Catwings” and the tale of how I happened to think of cats
with wings was all ready in in her computer — though she varied it according to
her mood and the age of the inquirer. She had a gracious, graceful tone in
discouraging problematic requests by explaining why I couldn’t personally reply
just now. She covered for me beautifully. She loved to answer children’s
letters, even when they were the mechanical kind some teachers make kids write.
The open kindness and generosity of her spirit lent all my correspondence a
quality it would never have had without her collaboration.

She never came more than once a week, usually only once
every three or four weeks. I’d do the most urgent business correspondence and
let the rest and the fan mail pile up. She got a computer before I did, and it
eased her work a great deal. When I got one, it didn’t make much difference at
first. But when e-mail really got going I began to be able to deal with all the
real business myself. Still Delores and I together handled non-urgent business,
the fan letters from readers, and what we called The Gimmies: the letters
everybody who becomes visible to the public gets, asking you to do this, give
to that, endorse this book, speak at that good cause, etc. Even if you can’t
possibly say yes to them, most such letters are well-intentioned and deserve a
civil no. Delores said no thank you in every possible way, always politely. It
was a great burden off me. She said that the Gimmies were boring but just
various enough to be entertaining too.

As for fan mail, letters from readers have always come to me
on paper only, my crude but effective way of keeping the volume down. The
letters people write me — often with pen and ink, or in pencil, crayon,
glitter, and other media if they’re children — are ever-amazing, giving me
immense pleasure and reward, but they are also never-ending. I knew there was
no way I could handle the load if I tried to read and answer them on my website
or on email. But I have always felt that such letters deserve a reply, however
brief, and for years Delores was my invaluable aide in answering them.

We loved each other as friends, but didn’t have extensive
contact outside our work sessions. She was a busy woman: she soon became Jean
Auel’s secretary four days a week, and was agent and manager for her husband
the painter Henk Pander; when her parents grew old and sick she looked after
them, and late in life she adopted and brought up her granddaughter. Our
friendship was expressed mostly during and in our working relationship. I
always looked forward to Delores coming, and we always spent half the time
talking, catching up. Once, when I was scared by a stalker, she and Henk gave
me wonderful immediate support.

As the years went on she seemed to grow shyer and more
withdrawn from her friends than she had been, I do not know why. She told me
once that she liked coming to work with me because we laughed together.

Her computer began to get out of date, and her life was
complicated by various issues; her energy was being overtried. She couldn’t or
didn’t want to figure out how to help me with e-correspondence the way she did
with paper mail, which she took home along with dictated answers or suggested
notes from me. So I came to do all the email and most of the letters, leaving
her only some Gimmies and no-thank-yous and those fan letters that needed only
acknowledgment.

Delores’s joy in life had been visibly flagging for a long
time when she was diagnosed, last year, with cancer. At first it seemed local
and curable, but proved to be metastasizing. It killed her in a few months.
There was a brief and lovely respite or remission for a few weeks late in her
illness, when we were able to visit with her quite often, and laughed together
as we had used to laugh. Then the cruel disease closed in again. She died a few
months ago, attended with great tenderness by her husband.

I find it extremely hard to talk about people I loved who
have died. I can’t now make a proper tribute to that complex and beautiful
woman, or say more than that I miss her friendship in every way.

Without her, I’ve had to give up the effort to answer fan
mail, at least temporarily. As for the Gimmies, some of them get answered, some
of them don’t. I suppose I could hire someone to do that.

5. Exorcists

The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States are holding a conference on
exorcism in Baltimore today and tomorrow. Many bishops and sixty priests
are there to learn the symptoms of demonic possession — you may be possessed if
you exhibit unusual strength, talk in a language you don’t know, or react
violently to anything holy — and the rites of exorcism, which include
sprinkling holy water on you, laying hands on you, recitations, invocations,
and blowing in your face.

The church updated the rite in 1999, advising that “all must be done to
avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.” This seems rather
like issuing directions for driving a car while cautioning that all must be
done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided.

I’d advise weightlifters and people learning a
foreign language to avoid Baltimore this weekend. I don’t know how to advise
people who react violently to anything holy. I don’t know who they are, because
I don’t know what kind of violent reaction is meant, and because “what is holy”
depends entirely on your perception of sacredness. If I am shaken by
unutterably strong emotion when I watch a pair of eagles dance with each other
on the wind, or when I hear the first notes of the theme of the last movement
of the Ninth Symphony, am I possessed by a demon? I don’t know, but I’m staying
away from Baltimore.

I think the people who should hurry there are the four male Catholic judges
of the United State Supreme Court, all of whom are adherents of the policies of
Pope Ratzinger and members of the ultra-reactionary Catholic group Opus
Dei. Exorcism lessons should enrich their repertory no end. The fifth
Roman Catholic in the Supreme Court is a woman, and thereby excluded from doing
the “work of God.”

6. The Lynx

Last week my friend Roger and I went out to Bend, the Eastern Oregon city where a lot of retired people in search of sunlight and a dry climate have been settling since the 90’s. From Portland the shortest road is over Mount Hood and through the vast Warm Springs Reservation. It was a bright late October day, with the big broadleaf maples making masses of pure gold in the evergreen forests. The blue of the sky got more intense as we went down from the summit into the clear air and open landscapes of Oregon’s Dry Side.

Bend is named, I guess, for the bend of its lively river in which it sits. The Three Sisters and other snow-cones of the Cascades tower up over it in the west, and the vast expanses of the high desert sweep on out eastward. In recent years the city grew and thrived with the influx of settlers, but it hit hard times with the recession. Too much of its prosperity depended on the construction trades. Downtown is still pleasant, but there are gaps, with several fine restaurants gone, and it looks as if some new resorts out toward Mt Bachelor are paralysed at the platting stage.

We stayed at a motel there on the west side of the river, which is built up at intervals, with bits of juniper forest and sagebrush plain in between. The long, wide boulevards go winding around in curves, crisscrossing each other at three- and four-exit roundabouts. It appears that the people who laid out the roads wanted to imitate what happens when you drop noodles on the floor. Though Tina at Camalli Books had given us careful instructions with all the road names and all the roundabout exits on the way to and from our motel — and though a western skyline of six- to ten-thousand-foot mountain peaks would seem to provide adequate orientation — we never once left the motel without getting lost.

I learned to dread the Old Mill District. As soon as I saw the sign saying Old Mill District I knew we were lost again. If Bend were a big city instead of just a far-flung one we might still be there trying to escape from the Old Mill District.

Roger and I were there to do a reading and signing of our book Out Here at the bookstore Friday evening and at the High Desert Museum Saturday afternoon. The Museum is on Highway 97 a few miles south of town. A bit farther on is Sunriver, one of the earliest and biggest resort developments. Roger suggested we have lunch there. Given the money that flows through those residential resorts, I was expecting something on the gourmet side; but the bar and grill served the same huge piles of heavy food that you get at a bar and grill anywhere in America, where the idea of a light lunch is a pound or two of nachos.

I haven’t stayed at Sunriver, but have spent a few nights at other high-end resorts in the area. They are laid out artfully to blend into the austere and beautiful landscape. Built of wood and painted or stained in a repetitive range of muted colors, the houses are unobtrusive, with plenty of space around them and trees left standing between them. All the streets curve. Straight streets are anathema to the resort mind. Right angles say City, and resorts are busy saying Country, and that’s why all the boulevards west of the river loop and swoop about so gracefully like noodles. The trouble is, since the juniper trees and the sage bushes and the buildings and the streets and the boulevards all look pretty much alike, if you don’t remember just where Colorado Drive connects with Century Drive before the roundabout exit to Cascade Drive, if you don’t have a good inner or external GPS system, you get lost.

Staying a couple of years ago at one of these resorts in a granny flat in somebody’s condo, I could get lost within a hundred yards of the house. All the curvy streets and roads were lined with groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones that exactly resembled the other groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones, and there were no landmarks, and it all went on, over and over, sprawling out, without sidewalks — because of course the existence of such a place is predicated entirely on driving, on getting to it, from it, and around it by car. I don’t drive.

Bend is, I believe, the largest city in America with no public transportation system. They were fixing to do something about that when the bottom fell out of the building trade.

So, after getting lost a couple of times walking, because I couldn’t tell which tastefully muted house on which curving road was my house, I was uneasy about going out again. But if granny didn’t go for a walk she was trapped in the granny flat. And that was pretty bad. When you first walked in, you thought, oh! very nice! — because the whole inner wall was a mirror, which reflected the room and the big window, making it look large and light. In fact, the room was so small it was almost entirely filled with bed.

The bed was piled with ornamental pillows. I counted them, but have forgotten how many there were — say twenty or twenty-five ornamental pillows, and four or five enormous teddy bears. When you took the bears and pillows off the bed so you could use the bed, there was no place to put them but on the floor around the bed, which meant there was no floor space, only pillows and bears. There was a tiny kitchen on the other side of a divider. No desk, no chair, though there was a blessed window seat to sit in, with a big view of trees and sky. I lived in the window seat, making my way through the bears and pillows when it was time for bed.

A door, which could not be locked, led down a corridor to the owners’ apartment, which was occupied. I put my suitcase and eight or ten of the pillows and the hugest, most obese teddy bear against the door as a barrier against absent-minded intrusion by my unknown hosts. But I didn’t have any real faith in that bear.

Roger and I kept passing that very resort on our noodly way to re-finding our motel, and I winced every time I saw it, afraid we might somehow get into it and get lost in it again.

I feel vaguely guilty about preferring a mere motel to a carefully planned, upscale residential resort. But the guilt is vague while the preference is clear and categorical. I like motels. Exclusivity isn’t my bag. “Gated communities” are not communities in any sense of the word I understand. I know that a great many of the people who own or timeshare or rent places in these Dry Side resorts go there not for the exclusive company of other middle-class white people, but for the marvelous air and light of the high desert, the forests, the ski-slopes, the spaciousness and silence. I know. That’s fine. Just don’t make me stay in one. Especially not one equipped with giant teddy bears.

But all this is merely preparation for getting to the lynx.

The lynx lives at the High Desert Museum. You can see a picture of him and read his story at Wild Cats of the West.

Briefly, when he was a kitten somebody pulled out his claws (“declawing” a cat is the same as pulling out a human being’s fingernails and toenails or cutting off the last joint of each toe and finger.) Then they pulled out his four great cat-fangs. Then they pretended he was their itty bitty kitty. Then they got tired of him, or got scared of him, and dumped him. He was found starving.

Like all the birds and animals at the High Desert Museum, he is a wild creature who can’t survive in the wild.

His cage is inside the main building. It is a long enclosure with three solid walls and one glass wall. It has trees and some hiding places, and is roofless, open to the weather and the sky

.

I don’t think I’d ever seen a lynx, when I first met him. He is a beautiful animal, chunkier and more compact than a mountain lion. His very thick dense fur of a honey-buff color has a flowing scatter of dark spots on legs and flanks and goes pure white on belly, throat, and beard. Big paws, ever so soft-looking, but you wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of one of those paws, even if its fierce, hooked weaponry has been torn out. Short tail, almost a stub — when it comes to tail, the mountain lion has it all over the lynx and bobcat. Lynx ears are rather queer and charming, with a long tip; his right ear is a bit squashed or bent. A big squarish head, with the calm, enigmatic cat smile, and great gold eyes.

The glass wall doesn’t look like oneway glass. I’ve never asked about it. If he is aware of the people on the other side of the glass, he doesn’t let them know it. He gazes out sometimes, but I have not seen his eyes catch on anything or follow anyone on the other side of the glass. His gaze goes right through you. You are not there. He is there.

I found and fell in love with the lynx during the last evening of a literary conference a couple of years ago. The writers at the meeting had been invited to a banquet at the Museum to meet and mix with people who supported the conference with donations. This kind of thing is a perfectly reasonable attempt to reward generosity, though, knowing what writers are like, it must often be terribly disappointing to the donors. It is also an ordeal for many of the writers. People like me who work alone tend to be introverts and, indeed, uncouth. If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.

During the hour of wine and cheese before dinner, all the donors and writers milled about the main hall of the Museum talking. Being no good at milling and talking, and noticing a corridor off the main hall with no people in it, I sneaked off to explore it. First I found the bobcat (who must wake up now and then, though so far I have only seen him asleep). Then, getting farther away from the chatter of my species, going farther into dimness and silence, I came on the lynx.

He was sitting gazing out into the dimness and silence with his golden eyes. The pure gaze of the animal, Rilke called it. The gaze that is purely gaze: that sees through.

For me, at that moment of feeling inadequate and out of place, the unexpected, splendid animal presence, his beauty, his perfect self-containment, was refreshment, consolation, peace.

I hung out with the lynx until I had to go back to the Bandar-Log. At the end of the party I sneaked back for a moment to see him again. He was sleeping majestically in his little tree-house, great soft paws crossed in front of his chest. I had lost my heart for good.

I saw him again last year when my daughter Elisabeth drove me around Eastern Oregon for four days (a grand trip, of which I hope to put a record in words and pictures on my site, if Elisabeth and I can goad each other into getting it together.) She and I saw the displays and the otters and the owls and the porcupine and everything else at the Museum, and ended in a long contemplation of the lynx.

And last week, before the reading, while Roger was doing all the hard work getting the books to sign into the Museum, I could spend another half hour with him. When I came, he was pacing about, very handsome and restless. If he had a tail that was worth lashing he would certainly have been lashing it. After a few minutes he vanished through a big metal cat-flap into some kind of back room not on view to the public. Fair enough, I thought, he wants some privacy. I went on to look at the live butterfly exhibit, which of course was lovely. The Oregon High Desert Museum is one of the most perfectly satisfying places I know.

When I came back down the corridor the lynx was sitting quite close to the glass eating a largish bird. A grouse, was my guess. At any rate a wild bird, not a chicken. He had a tail-feather hanging down from his chin for a while, which might have reduced his dignity in the eyes of beholders, but he does not acknowledge beholders.

He worked at his bird with diligence and care. He discussed his bird, as they used to say of people eating lamb chops. He was quite absorbed in discussing it. Lacking all four fangs, he was pretty much in the position of a human lacking incisors: he had to go at it sideways, with his molars. He did this neatly. It slowed him down, I am sure, but he never grew impatient, even when all he got was a mouthful of feathers. He just put a big soft honey-colored paw on his lunch and went at it again. When he got seriously inside the bird, some children who came by squealed, “Eeeyew! he’s eating the insides!” and other children who came by murmured with satisfaction, “Oh look, he’s eating the guts.”

I had to go away then and do the reading and signing, so I could not see him finish lunch.

When I came back after an hour or so for a goodbye glimpse, the lynx was curled up comfortably asleep in his tree-house bedroom. One wing and a beak lay on the dirt near the glass wall. On three tree-stumps, the servants of the lynx had laid out three dead mice — an elegant dessert presentation, as the fancy restaurants say. I imagined that later, when the Museum closed, when all the primates had finally gone away, the big cat might wake up and yawn, and stretch himself lithely down from his treehouse, and eat his desserts one by one, slowly, in silence, all by himself in the darkness.

There is a connection that I am groping for, a connection between the resorts and the lynx. Not the noodly streets that took us from one to the other, but a mental connection that has something to do with community and solitude.

The resorts are neither city nor country; they are semi-communities. Most of their population is occasional or transient. The only day-workers are gardeners, janitors, people doing upkeep. They don’t live in the nice houses. Most of the people that do are there not because their work takes them there but to get away from their work. They’re not there because they have common interests with others there but to get away from other people. Or to pursue sports such as golf and skiing, which pit the individual against himself. Or because they long for the solitude of the wilderness.

But we aren’t a solitary species. Like it or not, we are the Bandar-Log. We are social by nature, and thrive only in community. It is entirely unnatural for a human being to live long completely alone. So, when we get sick of crowds and yearn for space and silence, we build these semi-communities, pseudo-communities, in remote places. And then, sadly, by going to them, swarming into the desert, all too often we find no true community, but only destroy the solitude we sought.

As for cats, most of their species are not social at all. The nearest thing to a cat society is probably a troop of active lionesses providing for the cubs and the indolent male. Farm cats sharing a barn work out a kind of ad hoc social order, though the males tend to be less members of it than a danger to it. Adult male lynxes are loners. They walk by themselves.

The strange fortune of my lynx brought him to live in an artificial environment, a human community utterly foreign to him. His isolation from his natural, complex wilderness habitat is grievous and unnatural. But his aloofness, his aloneness, is the truth of his own nature. He retains that nature, brings it among us unchanged. He brings us the gift of his indestructible solitude.

7. A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters

I have come to see male group
solidarity as an immensely powerful force in human affairs, more powerful,
perhaps, than the feminism of the late 20th century took into
account.

It’s amazing,
given their different physiology and complement of hormones, how much alike
men and women are in most ways. Still it seems to be the fact that women on
the whole have less direct competitive drive and desire to dominate; and
therefore, paradoxically, have less need to bond with one another in ranked,
exclusive groups.

The power of male
group solidarity must come from the control and channeling of male rivalry,
the repression and concentration of the hormone-driven will to dominate that so
often dominates men themselves. It is a remarkable reversal. The destructive,
anarchic energy of individual rivalry and competitive ambition is diverted into
loyalty to group and leader and directed to more or less constructive social
enterprise.

Such groups are
closed, positing “the other” as outsider. They exclude, first, women; then,
men of a different age, or kind, or caste, or nation, or level of achievement,
etc. — exclusions that reinforce the solidarity and power of the excluders. Perceiving
any threat, the “band of brothers” joins together to present an impermeable
front.

Male solidarity
appears to me to have been the prime shaper of most of the great ancient
institutions of society — Government, Army, Priesthood, University, and the new
one that may be devouring all the others, Corporation. The existence and
dominance of these hierarchic, organized, coherent, durable institutions goes
back so far and has been so nearly universal that it’s mostly just called “how
things are,” “the world,” “the division of labor,” “history,” “God’s will,”
etc.

As for female
solidarity, without it human society, I think, would not exist. But it remains
all but invisible to men, history, and God

Female solidarity
might better be called fluidity — a stream or river rather than a structure.
The only institutions I am fairly sure it has played some part in shaping are
the tribe and that very amorphous thing, the family. Wherever the male
arrangement of society permits the fellowship of women on their own terms, it
tends to be casual, unformalised, unhierarchical; to be ad hoc rather than
fixed, flexible rather than rigid, and more collaborative than competitive.
That it has mostly operated in the private rather than the public sphere is a
function of the male control of society, the male definition and separation of
“public” and “private.” It’s hard to know if women’s groups would ever gather
into great centers, because the relentless pressure from male institutions
against such aggregation has prevented it. It might not happen, anyhow. Instead
of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the
energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and,
often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of
fluidity.

So, when the
interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on
men and the child-bearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role
assigned to women, it’s easy to declare that it simply doesn’t exist. Women
have no loyalty, do not understand what friendship is, etc. Denial is an
effective weapon in the hands of fear. The idea of female independence and
interdependence is met with scoffing hatred by both men and women who see
themselves as benefiting from male dominance. Misogyny is by no means limited
to men. Living in “a man’s world,” plenty of women distrust and fear
themselves as much or more than men do.

In so far as the
feminism of the nineteen-seventies played on fear, exalting the independence
and interdependence of women, it was playing with fire. We cried “Sisterhood is
powerful!” — and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were
howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where
the matches were.

The nature of
sisterhood is so utterly different from the power of brotherhood that it’s hard
to predict how it might change society. In any case, we’ve seen only a glimpse
of what its effects might be.

The great ancient
male institutions have been increasingly infiltrated by women for the last two
cenuries, and this is a very great change. But when women manage to join
the institutions that excluded them, they mostly end up being co-opted by
them, serving male ends, enforcing male values.

Which is why I
have a problem with women in combat in the armed services, and why I watch the
rise of women in the “great” universities and the corporations — even the
government — with an anxious eye.

Can women operate as
women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?

If so, will they
change the institution so radically that the men are likely to label it
second-class, lower the pay, and abandon it? This has happened to some extent
in several fields, such as the practice of teaching and medicine, increasingly
in the hands of women. But the management of those fields, the power, and the
definition of their aims, still belongs to men. The question remains open.

As I look back on
the feminism of the late twentieth century I see it as typical of feminine
solidarity — all Indians, no chiefs. It was an attempt to create an
unhierarchical, inclusive, flexible, collaborative, unstructured, ad hoc body
of people to bring the genders together in a better balance.

Women who want to
work toward that end, need, I think, to recognise and respect their own
elusive, invaluable, indestructible kind of solidarity — as do men. And they
need to recognise both the great value of male solidarity, and the inferiority
of gender solidarity to human solidarity — as do men.

I think feminism
continues and will continue to exist wherever women work in their own way
with one another and with men, and wherever women and men go on questioning
male definitions of value, refusing gender exclusivity, affirming
interdependence, distrusting aggression, seeking freedom always.

8. The Sissy Strikes Back

I’ve lost faith
in the saying, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” ever since I got
old.

It is a saying
with a fine heritage. It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive
Thinking that is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power
of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking aka The
American Dream. It is the bright side of Puritanism: What you deserve is
what you get. (Never mind just now about the dark side.) Good things come to
good people and youth will last forever for the young in heart.

Yup.

There is a whole
lot of power in positive thinking. It is the great placebo effect. In many
cases, even dire cases, it works. I think most old people know that, and many
of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of
self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged
whimper. It can be very hard to believe that one is actually eighty years old,
but, as they say, you’d better believe it. I’ve known clear-headed,
clear-hearted people in their nineties. They didn’t think they were young. They
knew, with a patient, canny clarity, how old they were. If I’m ninety and
believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the
bathtub. Even if I’m seventy and think I’m forty, I’m fooling myself to the
extent of almost certainly acting like an awful fool.

Actually, I’ve
never heard anybody over seventy say that you’re only as old as you think you
are. Younger people say it to themselves or each other as an encouragement. When they say it to somebody who actually is old they don’t realise how stupid
it is, and how cruel it may be. At least there isn’t a poster of it.

But there is a
poster of “Old age is not for sissies” — maybe it’s where the saying came
from. A man and a woman in their seventies. As I remember it, they both have
what the Air Force used to call The Look of Eagles, and are wearing very
tight-fitting minimal clothing, and are altogether very fit. Their pose
suggests that they’ve just run a marathon and aren’t breathing hard while they
relax by lifting 16-pound barbells. Look at us, they say. Old age is not for
sissies.

Look at me, I
snarl at them. I can’t run, I can’t lift barbells, and the thought of me in
tight-fitting minimal clothing is appalling in all ways. I am a sissy. I
always was. Who are you to say old age isn’t for me?

Old age is for
anybody who gets there. Warriors get old; sissies get old. In fact it’s
likely that more sissies than warriors get old. Old age is for the healthy, the
strong, the tough, the intrepid, the sick, the weak, the cowardly, the
incompetent. People who run ten miles every morning before breakfast and
people who live in a wheelchair. People who work the London Times crossword in
ink in ten minutes and people who can’t quite remember who the President is
just now. Old age is less a matter of fitness or courage than of luck equals
longevity.

If you eat your
sardines and leafy greens and wear SPF 150 and develop your abs and blabs and
slabs or whatever they are in order to live a long life, that’s good, and maybe
it will work. But the longer a life is, the more of it will be old age.

The leafy greens
and the workouts may well help that old age to be healthy, but unfair as it may
be, nothing guarantees health to the old. Bodies wear out after a certain
amount of mileage despite the most careful maintenance. No matter what you
eat and how grand your abs and blabs are, still your bones can let you down,
your heart can get tired of its incredible nonstop lifelong athletic
performance, and there’s all that wiring and stuff inside that can begin to
short-circuit. If you did hard physical labor all your life and didn’t really
have the chance to spend a lot of time in gyms, if you ate mostly junk food
because it’s all you knew about and all you could afford in time and money, if
you haven’t got a doctor because you can’t buy the insurance that stands
between you and the doctors and the medicines you need, you may arrive at old
age in rather bad shape. Or if you just run into some bad luck along the way,
accidents, illnesses, it’s the same. You won’t be running marathons and
lifting weights. You may have trouble getting up the stairs. You may have trouble
just getting out of bed. You may have trouble getting used to hurting all the
time. And it isn’t likely to get better as the years go on.

The compensations
of getting old, such as they are, aren’t in the field of athletic prowess. I
think that’s why the saying and the poster annoy me so much. They’re not only
insulting to sissies, they’re beside the point.

I’d like a poster
showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn
faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be: Old Age is not for the Young.

— UKL
9 December 2010

P.S. (9 December 2010, 3:30 p.m. PST) Only after I wrote this did it occur to me to Google “Old age is not for sissies” to see if there was a provenance other than the poster (which is available from Northern Sun, if you want it.) The quote is ascribed to Bette Davis, with the usual lack of specific location or context. My First Reader looked up a variation on it, which brings us H.L.Mencken (no location, no context) cited as saying “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” A reasonable guess is that Davis had read Mencken, as everybody did, remembered the line, and said it her way. In any case, neither Davis nor Mencken were exactly athletic, bodybuilder types, so it has quite a different ring coming from them.

As instructed, trained Subject 443 with machine gun and live
ammo and got him worked up to enter his fourth-grade classroom with dud gun we have
provided to quote “kill my asshole teacher and all them asshole kids what are
always laughing at me,” however am requesting further review of this project in
view of fact that Subject 443 although of part Muslim ancestry may be
undesirable subject for media attention due to fair complexion, blond hair,
blue eyes, and Anglo-Saxon-sounding name. Please advise.

— 003

Have attempted to carry out Project Egregious as instructed,
but have failed to implement suggestions that the subjects carry out jihad
against vile American infidels at their work place, possibly because languages
spoken by subjects appear to be Zulu and English and I deliver the suggestions
as instructed in Pakistani. Subjects appear uninterested and at times
irritated. Will continue making suggestions until I receive further
instructions. Please advise.

— 774.0

Urgent. Subject 088 has turned me in to local police
force as “would-be terrorist,” accusing me of plotting to blow up City Hall,
which is what I was encouraging him to do with a fake bomb, unfortunately I was
instructing him in detonation practice with small real bombs which are now in
his possession. Local officials of county jail where I am
incarcerated refuse to listen to me, describing my i.d. as “easily faked” and
making remarks such as “Yeah we know how you A-rabs love the USA” and
“Tell that to your fucking terrorist pals, wog.” Please advise at earliest
opportunity.